The Path Ahead:
Added 2020-01-25 22:14:14 +0000 UTCIt's time to let people know what's coming down the road. I've said most (Maybe all) of this before in bits and pieces, but we've got a lot of new players and I feel that now is a really good time to sort of recap everything that's going on.
The exciting stuff:
* I have a test build for Last Stand of Ra all put together. I'll be rolling that out for tester level supporters in the next couple of days and lacking any major problems I hope to release the final version of that game on January 31st.
* With Last Stand complete, I plan to focus that extra time on Inheritance for the time being. People have been asking me to focus all of my attention on Inheritance for a long time, so I'm going to give it a shot for a while. I like having more than one project as it helps keep things interesting and exciting for me as a writer. However, Inheritance offers the widest range of writing opportunities of any project I've ever worked on. I don't know how long I'll focus on just Inheritance, but it will be a couple of months at minimum, and I'll talk to the community about future projects when I start feeling the urge. (Odds are it will be drawn from one of the ideas I have pitched past all of you fine people in the past.)
Less exciting, but still important stuff:
* We've been doing a TON of work in the background. We've moved our repository from BitBucket to GitHub in the last few days because BitBucket will no longer be supporting some of the programs we make use of while developing the game.
* We have a coder who joined us recently. He's still learning his way around Inheritance (It's a big game, 1.5m words, thousands of scenes, . . . it takes time to get a feel for.) but he's got a lot more time he can invest into the game than the rest of our coding staff (Our coding staff is amazing. And this gives us someone who I can point toward projects rather than needing to plan around when our other coders will have time (Because we all have real lives, and some of us are busier than others.)) This coder is responsible for the dialogue boxes you've started to see show up in the game, the buttons that have started to replace links, and even did a lot of the work on the weather system that's in place (Only got one scene locked to the weather stuff so far, but will be going through and modifying as needed for existing scenes very soon.)
* Recently we've had several people start bug reporting who have been doing an outstanding job. (You know who you are. I love you guys.) They've been pointing out ANYTHING they find, including a host of spelling/grammar errors. I've made literally hundreds of minor fixes coming into A37 of Inheritance, and every indication is that these players will be continuing to help out for some time to come. It may not seem like a lot, but this adds a lot of polish to the game and helps make Inheritance better for everyone who plays it.
The Path Ahead: (AKA: The short version)
* With the final version of Last Stand of Ra all but released that extra time will be focused on Inheritance, increasing the amount of time I can spend working on that project for the time being.
* We have extra coding help now, which will most likely result in us finally being able to add a LOT of the elements to the game we've wanted to add for a long time now. Things like fully functioning shops and the Lab are finally starting to see development in the background again (They've been on hold for a long time because the time our coders can dedicate to Inheritance has always been limited, our new coder is helping pull up a lot of the slack in that area of development.)
PS: Weekly polls will be returning VERY soon! Not sure if I'll put one up this weekend, or wait until next week yet, but they should appear weekly again after I get the next one up.